UPDATE: This story was updated at 1 p.m. with comment from other lawmakers and the White House.

WASHINGTON — After a maelstrom of criticism from Democrats, ethics watchdog groups and even President-elect Donald Trump, House Republicans returning to Washington have withdrawn a controversial proposal that would have weakened an independent ethics review board.

The Office of Congressional Ethics, created in 2008 amid a Democratic-led push to clean up a scandal-scarred Congress, is charged with reviewing complaints against lawmakers and staff. The nonpartisan panel reports to a board of private citizens.

But the amendment, introduced in a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Monday night by Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, would have placed the panel under the purview of the House Ethics Committee. Among the sweeping changes, the House committee would have been able to halt the panel's investigations.

Republicans in favor of the change included many Texas members who said it would give lawmakers greater due process, particularly in the face of fighting at-times anonymous allegations filed with the nonpartisan review board.

Opponents of the move, including Republicans and Democrats alike, ethics watchdog groups and even disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, said it would weaken oversight and is an affront to Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign pledge.

House Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy opposed the change, saying overhaul of the ethics office needed bipartisan support. Still, 119 Republican members reportedly voted for it during a secret ballot, with 74 opposed.

But early Tuesday — as lawmakers prepared to convene the 115th Congress — Trump took to social media to urge them to focus on more pressing matters, such as an overhaul of the tax code and Obamacare.

With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it

The president-elect didn’t directly oppose the changes but appeared to question the timing, tweeting: “With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it may be, their number one act and priority?”

Though Ryan and McCarthy later defended the amendment, saying it contained many changes supported on both sides of the aisle, Republican leaders called a special GOP conference late Tuesday morning in which they scrapped the proposal.

Dallas Rep. Pete Sessions, the House Rules Committee chairman, said moments before the emergency meeting that he supported the changes, calling the ethics panel in its current form "unfair, unfounded, unworkable."

Sessions said "every left-wing organization" had called his office to express displeasure with the proposal, to which he said staffers responded: "Thank you very much, we appreciate your feedback, but we are trying to do a process that is done on a bipartisan way and done correctly."

Other lawmakers also said their offices were flooded with calls from concerned constituents.

Sessions brushed off Trump's criticism. "I would question whether he understands why [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi did this and the effect of it, but he's entitled to his opinion," Sessions said. Pelosi led the creation of the ethics panel.

After the proposal was stripped, a visibly agitated Sessions said he would stand behind the party's decision but added that he expects it will come back up later in the session.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway, a former chairman of the Ethics Committee, also supported the move before the decision to eliminate it from the rules package.

"Most all the individual pieces, everybody agrees with," Conaway, a Midland Republican, said. "They spend taxpayer dollars and they ought to have somebody from Congress who's responsible to the voters to oversee that. Changing the name, changing the dates, those kinds of things are pretty innocuous."

Austin Rep. Roger Williams, who is under review by the House Ethics Committee , said after the meeting that he also supports changes to the office but agreed with the decision to push back any action to focus on other issues. "Certainly we need to do something about this agency, if you want to call it that," he said. "But most people felt like it was not the time to do it."

Williams would not have been affected by the proposed changes because the ethics office has already referred his matter to the House Ethics Committee. That committee is considering whether Williams, a former auto dealer, violated conflict-of-interest rules by tacking onto a federal highway bill an amendment that would exempt some auto dealers from a ban on renting out cars recalled due to safety issues.

Republican Tyler Rep. Louie Gohmert said he missed Monday’s late-night vote because he was attending a funeral but that he supported the proposal.

Though he hasn't been the subject of an ethics investigation, Gohmert said before the last-minute decision to strip the rule that he knows “a lot of people who were unfairly attacked” without knowing their accuser or the allegation against them, compelling them to incur legal fees to defend themselves.

Gohmert said he believes Trump would support the changes if he were more familiar with the ethics panel process. “Having seen the way this worked and how unfairly it hurt so many people actually on both sides of the aisle, it was a reining-in that needed to happen,” he said.

At least one Texan was against the proposed changes: Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, of Amarillo, according to a tweet issued by his office.

@SSlemmons Mac believes that OCE is in need of reform, but that was not the proper way to go about it. He voted against.

At the White House, press secretary Josh Earnest chided the House GOP effort and said it foreshadows corruption and favoritism toward wealthy donors in the months to come.

"It is rather revealing that the first step taken by congressional Republicans in the new Congress was to vote in secret to gut ethics regulations ... put in place by Democrats in response to ethics scandals plaguing congressional Republicans," he said.